Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Page 4

  Masochism, of course. This was part of the Psyche Game which Humboldt had studied under its modern masters, a game far more subtle and rich than any patented parlor entertainment. Out in the country Humboldt lay on his sofa reading Proust, pondering the motives of Albertine. He seldom allowed Kathleen to drive to the supermarket without him. He hid the ignition key from her and kept her in purdah.

  He was a handsome man still, Kathleen adored him. He, however, suffered keen Jewish terrors in the country. He was an Oriental, she a Christian maiden, and he was afraid. He expected the KKK to burn a cross in his yard or shoot at him through the window as he lay on the Castro sofa reading Proust or inventing scandal. Kathleen told me that he looked under the hood of the Buick for booby traps. More than once Humboldt tried to get me to confess that I had similar terrors about Demmie Vonghel.

  A neighboring farmer had sold him green logs. These smoked in the small fireplace as we sat after dinner. On the table was the stripped skeleton of a turkey. The wine and beer were going fast. There was an Ann Page coffee cake and melting maple-walnut ice cream. A slight cesspool smell rose to the window, and the Skellgas cylinders resembled silver artillery shells. Humboldt was saying that Stevenson was a man of real culture, the first really since Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson was inferior in this respect to Stevenson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew Shakespeare well and quoted him at the crises of his life. “There’s nothing serious in mortality, All is but toys. . . . Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well . . .” These were Lincoln’s premonitions just as Lee was about to surrender. Frontiei-smen were never afraid of poetry. It was Big Business with its fear of femininity, it was the eunuchoid clergy capitulating to vulgar masculinity that made religion and art sissy things. Stevenson understood that. If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t) Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his administration cabinet members would quote Yeats and Joyce. The new Joint Chiefs would know Thucydides. Humboldt would be consulted about each State of the Union message. He was going to be the Goethe of, the new government and build Weimar in Washington. “You be thinking what you might like to do, Charlie. Something in the Library of Congress, for a start.”

  Kathleen said, “There’s a good program on the Late Late Show. An old Bela Lugosi movie.”

  She saw that Humboldt was overexcited. He would not sleep tonight.

  Very good. We tuned in the horror picture. Bela Lugosi was a mad scientist who invented synthetic flesh. He daubed it on himself, making a fearful mask, and he broke into the rooms of beautiful maidens who screamed and fell unconscious. Kathleen, more fabulous than scientists, more beautiful than any of the ladies, sat with a hazy absent freckled half-smile. Kathleen was a somnambulist. Humboldt had surrounded her with the whole crisis of Western Culture. She went to sleep. What else could she do? I understand these decades of sleep. This is a subject 1 know well. Meantime Humboldt kept us from going to bed. He took Amytal to overcome the Benzedrine, on top of which he drank gin.

  I went out and walked in the cold. Light poured from the cottage into ruts and gullies, over the tangled road-crown of wild carrot and ragweed. Yapping dogs, foxes maybe, piercing stars. The late-late spooks jittered through the windows, the mad scientist shot it out with the police, his lab exploded, and he died in flames, the synthetic flesh melting from his face.

  Demmie on Barrow Street would be watching this same picture. She didn’t have insomnia. She dreaded sleep and preferred horror movies to bad dreams. Toward bedtime Demmie always grew restless. We would take in the 10 o’clock news and walk the dog and play backgammon and double solitaire. Then we would sit on the bed and watch Lon Chaney throwing knives with his feet.

  I hadn’t forgotten that Humboldt tried to make himself into Demmie’s protector, but I no longer had it in for him. As soon as they met, Demmie and Humboldt would begin at once to talk about old movies and new pills. When they discussed Dexamil so passionately and learnedly they lost me. But it pleased me that they had so much in common. “He’s a grand man,” said Demmie.

  And Humboldt said of Demmie, “This girl really knows her pharmaceuticals. This is an exceptional girl.” But not to tamper was more than he could bear, so he added, “She’s got a few things to get out of her system.”

  “Bunk. What things? She’s already been a juvenile delinquent.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Humboldt. “If life is not intoxicating, it’s nothing. Here it’s burn or rot. The USA is a romantic country. If you want to be sober, Charlie, it’s only because you’re a maverick and you’ll try anything.” Then he lowered his voice and spoke looking at the floor. “What about Kathleen, does she look wild? But she let herself be stolen and sold by her father to Rockefeller. . . .”

  “I still don’t know which Rockefeller bought her.”

  “I wouldn’t make any plans about Demmie, Charlie. That girl has a lot of agony to get through yet.”

  He was meddling, just meddling. Still, I took this to heart. For there was a lot of agony in Demmie. Some women wept as softly as a watering can in the garden. Demmie cried passionately, as only a woman who believes in sin can cry. When she cried you not only pitied her, you respected her strength of soul.

  Humboldt and I were up talking half the night. Kathleen lent me a sweater; she saw that Humboldt would sleep very little and maybe she took advantage of my visit to get a little rest, foreseeing an entire week of manic nights when there would be no guest to spell her.

  As a foreword to this Evening of Conversation with Von Humboldt Fleisher (for it was a sort of recital) I should like to offer a succinct historical statement: There came a time (Early Modern) when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why not? Whispers of sane judgment plainly told him why not and made this comical. As long as we were laughing we were okay. At that time I was more or less a candidate myself. I, too, saw great opportunities, scenes of ideological victory, and personal triumph.

  Now a word about Humboldt’s conversation. What was the poet’s conversation actually like?

  He wore the look of a balanced thinker when he began, but he was not the picture of sanity. I myself loved to talk and kept up with him as long as I could. For a while it was a double concerto, but presently I was fiddled and trumpeted off the stage. Reasoning, formulating, debating, making discoveries Humboldt’s voice rose, choked, rose again, his mouth went wide, dark stains formed under his eyes. His eyes seemed blotted. Arms heavy, chest big, pants gathered with much belt to spare under his belly, the loose end of leather hanging down, he passed from statement to recitative, from recitative he soared into aria, and behind him played an orchestra of intimations, virtues, love of his art, veneration of its great men—but also of suspicion and skulduggery. Before your eyes the man recited and sang himself in and out of madness.

  He started by talking about the place of art and culture in the first Stevenson administration—his role, our role, for we were going to make hay together. He began this with an appreciation of Eisenhower. Eisenhower had no courage in politics. See what he allowed Joe McCarthy and Senator Jenner to say about General Marshall. He had no guts. But he shone in logistics and public relations, and he was no fool. He was the best type of garrison officer, easygoing, a bridge-player, he liked girls and read Zane Grey Westerns. If the public wanted a relaxed government, if it had recovered sufficiently from the Depression and now wanted a holiday from war, and felt strong enough to get along without New Dealers and prosperous enough to be ungrateful, it would vote for Ike, the sort of prince who could be ordered from a Sears Roebuck cat
alogue. Maybe it had had enough of great personalities like FDR and energetic men like Truman. But he didn’t wish to underrate America. Stevenson might make it. Now we would see where art would go in a liberal society, whether it was compatible with social progress. Meantime, having mentioned Roosevelt, Humboldt hinted that FDR might have had something to do with the death of Bronson Cutting. Senator Cutting’s plane had crashed while he was flying from his home state after a vote recount. How did that happen? Maybe J. Edgar Hoover was involved. Hoover kept his power by doing the dirty work of presidents. Remember how he tried to damage Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. From this Humboldt turned to Roosevelt’s sex life. Then from Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover to Lenin and Dzerzhinsky of the GPU. Then back to Sejanus, and the origins of secret police in the Roman Empire. Next he spoke of Trotsky’s literary theories and how heavy a load great art made in the baggage train of the Revolution. Then he went back to Ike and the peacetime life of professional soldiers in the Thirties. The drinking habits of the military. Churchill and the bottle. Confidential arrangements to protect the great from scandal. Security measures in the male brothels of New York. Alcoholism and homosexuality. The married and domestic lives of pederasts. Proust and Charlus. Inversion in the German Army before 1914. Late at night Humboldt read military history and war memoirs. He knew Wheeler-Bennett, Chester Wilmot, Lid-dell Hart, Hitler’s generals. He also knew Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson and Leonard Lyons and Red Smith, and he moved easily from the tabloids to General Rommel and from Rommel to John Donne and T. S. Eliot. About Eliot he seemed to know strange facts no one else had ever heard. He was filled with gossip and hallucination as well as literary theory. Distortion was inherent, yes, in all poetry. But which came first? And this rained down on me, part privilege, part pain, with illustrations from the classics and the sayings of Einstein and Zsa Zsa Gabor, with references to Polish socialism and the football tactics of George Halas and the secret motives of Arnold Toynbee, and (somehow) the used-car business. Rich boys, poor boys, jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen’s clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi. With Ferenczi he always made the same observation: nothing could be further from instinct than rationality and therefore, according to Ferenczi, rationality was also the height of madness. As proof, how crazy Newton became! And at this point Humboldt generally spoke of Antonin Artaud. Artaud, the playwright, invited the most brilliant intellectuals in Paris to a lecture. When they were assembled there was no lecture. Artaud came on stage and screamed at them like a wild beast. “Opened his mouth and screamed,” said Humboldt. “Raging screams. While those Parisian intellectuals sat frightened. For them it was a delicious event. And why? Artaud as the artist was a failed priest. Failed priests specialize in blasphemy. Blasphemy is aimed at a community of believers. In this case, what kind of belief? Belief only in intellect, which a Ferenczi has now charged with madness. But what does it mean in a larger sense? It means that the only art intellectuals can be interested in is an art which celebrates the primacy of ideas. Artists must interest intellectuals, this new class. This is why the state of culture and the history of culture become the subject matter of art. This is why a refined audience of Frenchmen listens respectfully to Artaud screaming. For them the whole purpose of art is to suggest and inspire ideas and discourse. The educated people of modern countries are a thinking rabble at the stage of what Marx called primitive accumulation. Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse. Artaud’s scream is an intellectual thing. First, an attack on the nineteenth-century ‘religion of art,’ which the religion of discourse wants to replace. . . .

  “And you can see for yourself, Charlie,” said Humboldt after more of this, “how important it is for the Stevenson administration to have a cultural adviser like me who understands this worldwide process. Somewhat.”

  Above us, Kathleen was getting into bed. Our ceiling was her floor. The boards were bare and you heard every movement. I rather envied her. I was now shivering and would have liked to get under the covers myself. But Humboldt was pointing out that we were only fifteen minutes from Trenton and two hours from Washington by train. He could shoot right in. He confided that Stevenson had already been in touch with him and that a meeting was being arranged. Humboldt asked me to help him prepare notes for this conversation, and until three in the morning we discussed this. Then I went to my room and left Humboldt pouring himself a last cup of gin.

  Next day he was still going strong. It made me giddy to hear so much subtle analysis and to have so much world history poured over my head at breakfast. He hadn’t slept at all.

  To calm himself he took a run. With slovenly shoes he pounded the gravel. Waist-high in dust, his arms bunched against his chest, he descended the road. He seemed to sink down into it under the sumacs and small oaks, between banks of brittle crab grass, thistle, milkweed, puffballs. Burrs were sticking to his pants when he returned. For running, too, he had a text. When Jonathan Swift was secretary to Sir Wm. Temple he ran miles every day to blow off steam. Thoughts too rich, emotions too dense, dark expressive needs? You could do some roadwork. That way, you sweated out the gin, too.

  He took me for a stroll and the cats accompanied us through the dead leaves and brush. They practiced pouncing. They attacked ground gossamers. With grenadier tails they bounded to sharpen their claws on trees. Humboldt was extremely fond of them. The morning air was infused with something very nice. Humboldt went in and shaved and then we drove in the fateful Buick to Princeton.

  My job was in the bag. We met Sewell for lunch—a muttering subtle drunken backward-leaning hollow-faced man. He had little to say to me. At the French restaurant he wanted to gossip with Humboldt about New York and Cambridge. Sewell, a cosmopolitan if there ever was one (in his own mind), had never gone abroad before. Humboldt didn’t know Europe either. “If you’d like to go, old friend,” said Sewell, “we could arrange that.”

  “I don’t feel quite ready,” said Humboldt. He was afraid that he would be kidnaped by former Nazis or by GPU agents.

  And as Humboldt walked me to the train, he said, “I told you it was just a formality, this interview. We’ve known each other for years, and we’ve written about each other, Sewell and I. But there are no hard feelings at all. Only I wonder why Damascus wants to know about Henry James. Well, Charlie, it should be a cheerful season for us. And if I should have to go to Washington, I know I can count on you to run things here.”

  “Damascus!” I said. “Among those Arabs he’ll be the Sheik of Apathy.”

  Pale Humboldt opened his mouth. Through small teeth he gave his near-silent laugh.

  At that time I was an apprentice and a bit player and Sewell had treated me like one. He had seen, I expect, a soft-fibered young man, handsome enough but slack, with large sleepy-looking eyes, a bit overweight, and with a certain reluctance (it showed in his glance) to become enthusiastic about other people’s enterprises. That he failed to appreciate me made me sore. But such vexatious lions always filled me with energy as well. And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress. So I owed Sewell quite a lot and it was ungrateful of me, years later when I read in the Chicago paper that he was dead, to say, as I sipped my whisky, what I occasionally did say at such moments —death is good for some people. I remembered then the wisecrack I had made to Humboldt as we walked to the Princeton Dinkey connecting with the Junction. People die and the stinging things I said about them come winging back to attach themselves to me. What about this apathy? Paul of Tarsus woke up on the road to Damascus but Sewell of Princeton would sleep even deeper there. Such was my wicked meaning. I confess I am sorry now that I had said such a thing. I should add, about that interview, that it was a mistake to let Demmie Vonghel send me down dres
sed in charcoal gray, in a button-down collar, a knitted maroon necktie, and maroon cordovan shoes, an instant Prince-tonian.

  Anyway, it was not long after I read Sewell’s obituary in the Chicago Daily News, leaning on the kitchen counter at 4 p.m. with a glass of whisky and a snack of pickled herring, that Humboldt, who had been dead for five or six years, re-entered my life. He came from left field. I shan’t be too exact about the time of this. I was then becoming careless about time, a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger questions.

  four

  And now the present. A different side of life—entirely con-temporary.

  It was in Chicago, and not very long ago by the calendar, that I left the house one morning in December to see Murra, my accountant, and when I got downstairs I found that my Mercedes-Benz had been attacked in the night. I don’t mean that it had been banged and scraped by a reckless or drunken driver who ran away without leaving a note under my wipers. I mean that my car had been pounded all over, I assume with baseball bats. This elite machine, no longer new but worth eighteen thousand dollars three years ago, had been mauled with a ferocity difficult to grasp—to grasp, I mean, even in an esthetic sense, for these Mercedes coupes are beautiful, the silver-gray ones in particular. My dear friend George Swiebel had even said once, with a certain bitter admiration, “Murder Jews and make machines, that’s what those Germans really know how to do.”

  The attack on this car was hard on me also in a sociological sense, for I always said that I knew my Chicago and I was convinced that hoodlums, too, respected lovely automobiles. Recently a car was sunk in the Washington Park lagoon and a man was found in the trunk who had tried to batter his way out with tire-tools. Evidently he was the victim of robbers who decided to drown him—get rid of the witness. But I recall thinking that his car was only a Chevrolet. They would never have clone such a thing to a Mercedes 280-SL. I said to my friend Renata that / might be knifed or stomped on an Illinois Central platform but that this car of mine would never be hurt.